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OSButler

215 karma · joined November 19, 2010

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OSButler··on Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat
As a player it was just less annoying back in the dedicated server days, since cheaters were dealt with immediately. Nowadays you have to report them in most of the competitive games and then it can take anywhere from several hours to weeks before anything happens. It just feels like the protections have become more and more invasive, yet are still far behind the original community managed servers from back in the day.
OSButler··on South Korea has limited a working week to 52 hours, in order to stop overwork
Not to mention company outings/excursions during the weekends and additional courses/education after work. Japan is usually coming up when talking about crazy work hours, but South Korea appeared to be just as bad, so I'm curious how such regulation would actually apply if all those extra hours are not being counted to your actual work hours.
OSButler··on Making Millions by Distributing Pirated Movies
Not to mentioned regional modified versions of the movie/tv show, especially in regards to music, where it will be replaced with some random song that often doesn't make any sense.
OSButler··on Wolf Puppies Are Adorable, Then Comes the Call of the Wild
My parents got a Malamute puppy and he could be left unleashed without any issues until he was about 1.5 - 2 years old. Then the instincts kicked in and he would hunt after anything that moved, so that they had to start using a leash to prevent him from running off all the time.

At the time they lived in the country and had a hiking area directly behind the house. My father would just put a leash on the dog and then let him lead the way around the mountain. He mentioned that it felt like a good experience for both of them, since he managed to see new parts of the mountain, due to the dog guiding him off the trail every now and then, and the dog was happy to lead. However, things went a bit south after my father had to leave for several months and it was my mother's turn to look after the dog. He would just pull her behind him like a sled and she had no control whatsoever over the dog.

Eventually, she went to a dog trainer with him, which improved things significantly, so that she was at least able to walk the dog without being dragged behind him. However, everything went out the window as soon as he smelled some kind of dead animal, or when he saw a deer or porcupine. Nevertheless, there were no major incidents with the dog, apart from some growling when you were trying to get him off an animal carcass.

It was definitely a much more difficult dog to handle compared to other domesticated breeds I've had or met so far, but at the same time he provided some of the most unique experiences I've had with a dog whenever you would hike with him through the mountains.

OSButler··on How flying messes with the mind
For long distance flights, I'm doing the opposite of 2), where I'll stay awake on purpose the day before the flight, so that I can sleep through most of it. However, this only works if you're able to sleep in a plane.
OSButler··on What does ‘that = this’ in JavaScript mean?
If you're using React and you're not using arrow functions, then it's very common to see bind() references.
OSButler··on Twitch to start selling video games this week
Especially on consoles, there are a lot of platform specific exclusive in-game items/missions/cosmetics/... and I'm wondering if this starts to become more common for the different PC release platforms as well.

Twitch Prime provides some exclusive in-game items and steam has had exclusive cosmetics in the past as well already, so while having multiple venues to purchase your PC games from is always good for the market, I'm wondering if we're going to end up in a console-like situation where the exclusive addons are setting apart the games on the individual platforms.

OSButler··on 10,000 Games projects have been successfully funded on Kickstarter
Kickstarter still feels like such a grey area to me. Only a few of the games I've backed ended up in a product that I would've bought, if it was a regular released game. Nowadays, I prefer waiting until the actual release version is available and then decide whether to buy it or not, but I'm not funding any more kickstarter games due to all the bad experiences.
OSButler··on Canadian journalist's detention at US border raises press freedom alarms
My first time visiting the US was by car, as we planned a road trip to visit some of the bigger cities and parks along the way. We were held for 2 hours at the first border crossing, since the agent processing our paperwork believed the address we provided for our first stop was made up: "There is no address in SF that is just the number 1, it's always in the hundreds.". We were being treated as if he had made his catch of the day and we'd be denied entry, or worse, any time now.

They had to verify the address (surprise, some streets start with the number 1, who would've thought?) and then another officer gave us the needed visa and let us into the country, all the while the original officer was glaring at us as if we somehow managed to find a loophole to gain entry into the country.

OSButler··on Bringing Down Millions of WordPress Sites
One big problem with Timthumb was that several themes came pre-bundled with it and to make matters worse, they often changed the name of the file, so that it wasn't enough to just scan for the filename but also for variants and file contents.

At the time it was the exploit that kept on giving, since you would suddenly find another timthumb related file on the server that was being targeted, followed by another, ... In the end, a lot of the hosts simply blocked requests to timthumb related files, in order to try and stop it on the server level and not the individual account level.

As you mentioned, these days the sites that I'm being contacted about that have been defaced or were hosting abusive content, are usually related to severely outdated plugins. I haven't seen a timthumb issue in quite some time, but had to restore a site that was affected by the original(!) Revolution slider exploit recently, due to having a several years old version of it installed.

OSButler··on Apple Introduces What It Calls an Easier to Use Portable Music Player (2001)
I'm sorry, I must remember it wrong then. I recall that I had the option to buy either of them at the time and that I had to place a preorder for the Jukebox 3, which kept on getting delayed for quite a while. Also, this was not in NA, but a quick search for the original ipod release date in that country didn't yield any results, so I'm not sure if I'm just remembering it wrong and that there was quite a bit of time in between, or if it actually did become available at a later time in that country.
OSButler··on Apple Introduces What It Calls an Easier to Use Portable Music Player (2001)
This is anecdotal, but maybe it'll explain a bit more where I was coming from in regards to my reaction to the initial ipod reveal. Back then, my music player adaption went from CD Player, CD Player with MP3 CD support, to Nomad Jukebox 3. Size was not an issue at the time, since I was used to the CD player size and was more looking for ways to get rid of all the CDs I had to keep bringing with me. The Jukebox 3 had the largest HDD at the time, as far as I recall, and allowed me to put my full CD collection on it at that time already. It was also running on a larger battery brick and had an additional slot for another battery to extend its playtime. The batteries were charged in an external charger, so that you could simply swap out the batteries and keep on taking the player with you. It also came with a remote control, which was more of a gimmick, but came in handy every once in a while. The UI allowed browsing through a scroll wheel on its side and you could access the music through various ways (as far as I recall: genre, artist, album, song, and playlist). Especially the scroll wheel was so easy to use compared to the click wheel on the ipod, which appeared to be more gimmicky than useful at the time.

Of course, by now things have changed and I love the fact that I can put all that music on my phone and being able to connect it to all the different devices (bluetooth & audio jack speakers/headphones), so that I wouldn't want to take a dedicated MP3 player, especially the size of the Jukebox 3, with me anymore.

However, at the time of the original ipod release the lack of HDD size in favour of hardware size didn't make any sense to me and I still catch myself thinking like that during some of the Apple release events since, where it sometimes seems like they're taking one step forward and multiple steps back - will be interesting to see what happens during the upcoming Macbook event.

OSButler··on Apple Introduces What It Calls an Easier to Use Portable Music Player (2001)
I owned a Nomad Jukebox around the time of the original ipod release and couldn't understand the hype around the ipod, as it was lacking in functionality, specs, and especially usability compared to the nomad. CmdrTaco's quote gets mentioned a few times in this thread, but I shared his opinion at the time, as it just seemed so obvious that the ipod was lacking when compared to other devices on the market. However, it's actually kind of interesting looking back at such events, since they seemed to be so trivial at the time but are now touted as turning points in the industry. Makes one wonder what other "hits" I'll miss out on in the future.
OSButler··on Japan has a worrying number of virgins, government finds
It would be interesting to hear the point of view from a Japanese on those numbers. How is the dating scene? Are those numbers surprising or matching with your own experiences?
OSButler··on Latest Intel, AMD chips won't support Windows versions earlier than Windows 10
I've been looking for a comprehensive guide before but haven't found anything yet. Most of the custom changes I've done were the result of software mentioned in online articles, or google searches in regards to my specific issues.
OSButler··on Latest Intel, AMD chips won't support Windows versions earlier than Windows 10
Yes, but that doesn't work if you require Windows, such as for gaming. There's SteamOS, but its support is still limited. If gaming was as universally supported on linux as on Windows, then I'd switch right away, but unfortunately Windows is still its major platform so you need to try and make the best out of its shortcomings, if you're serious about gaming.
OSButler··on Latest Intel, AMD chips won't support Windows versions earlier than Windows 10
Except when it doesn't.

My Win10 install was showing a constant 100% disk usage right after upgrading from Win8.1. I read online that it can be caused by Windows search indexing all the files, so I simply left it running. After 2 days I had enough, stopped all the search related services, and disabled them where possible. Then the Cortana update got released and the exact same thing happened again with search processes taking up all the available disk I/O.

Network speed was also an issue where Win10 kept on downloading updates while the PC was in heavy use instead of doing so when in idle status. That's when I found out about above mentioned 12hs update window, where it kept on downloading stuff in the background whenever I had a late/early gaming session.

CPU usage was not as bad as the disk usage issues, in my case, but there are the occasional spikes from Windows processes even when in idle status.

That's why I had to start looking into options in regards to trimming down Windows to its bare minimum features, as the system was barely usable with its constant disk usage spikes.

PC configurations differ, so of course your milage may vary. Just from my own personal experience I know people on both ends of the spectrum, where everything just worked for them, or it was so bad that it rendered their PC useless and they went back to their previous Windows version. In my case I just had to figure out how to prevent Windows from doing certain tasks that would end up having a noticeable effect on the system performance.

OSButler··on Latest Intel, AMD chips won't support Windows versions earlier than Windows 10
I have a unix based system for work and am using a Windows 10 PC solely for gaming purposes. Win10 makes it incredibly difficult to try and trim down your Windows installation to its bare minimum, so that the disk, cpu, and network activity won't affect your gaming experience.

Then there's the forced update system, which allows you to define a time interval where it won't automatically install updates, but it can't be set to more than a 12hs window. It just feels like an OS that thinks it knows what's best for you, but it actually results in an inferior experience compared to the previous versions due to its limited configurability.

I haven't played around with the registry and internals that much since Win'95, just because it adds all this unneeded overhead without any option to remove it from within its own settings.

Don't get me wrong, it certainly works and I'm getting used to all its new features and changes, but Win10 makes it really hard to optimize it to your specific needs for seemingly unnecessary reasons, so I can understand why people want to stick to their Win7 or even Win8 installs.

OSButler··on Speech Is 3x Faster Than Typing for English and Mandarin on Mobile Devices
Yes, speech recognition and auto-correct have been more of nuisance than improvement for me.

Speech recognition works most of the time, but I often end up with one word that Siri just doesn't understand and then you end up spending more time trying to figure out how the device wants you to pronounce the word than it helps you saving time by using it instead of just typing it out. There are also some funny videos of foreign speakers trying to use Siri when it first came out - that has been exactly my experience with it as well.

Auto-correct is the other annoying one, which can wreak havoc when you're texting in multiple languages. Even if you manage to setup your device properly with all the different languages, it can still cause some problems whenever you mix the languages within a single message. However, the biggest problem I've experienced so far is when you send messages between parties where one of them doesn't have the foreign (latin based) language installed/configured yet. The replies I've received from people on their new phones often ranged from funny to cryptic, where you have no idea what they were trying to tell you. They just typed in the foreign text and hit send without checking only to have auto-correct send you something intangible.

OSButler··on After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy
US Netflix has a decent collection of Korean movies for example, where new movies have been added on a regular basis for the past year or so. It's just that the Hollywood content is most prominently displayed on the home page, but if you know what you're looking for, then there may be a few worthwhile sub-categories available for you on Netflix.
OSButler··on After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy
Oh yes, I'm constantly clashing with unavailable/blocked Japanese content. Crunchyroll has quite a bit of non-anime content to offer, but it's still far from other country specific streaming sites.

The oddest thing for me are the constantly blocked Japanese music videos on Youtube. I'm not talking copyright infringing content, but music videos published on the official band/performer's channel and being viewable from within Japan only. Why is a music video blocked outside of Japan, when you can buy the song via the regional iTunes store? One would assume that a music video is meant to promote the music sales, so why are so many of them blocked outside of Japan then?

OSButler··on After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy
Their blocking seems to be quite aggressive, as a lot of regular hosting providers even had their IP ranges blocked by them. I've been following a few forum posts where people were sharing their working VPN provider/ISP, but those were showing the same error message a few days later, so it looks like they are actively monitoring traffic and maybe even social media to block further IP ranges.
OSButler··on Canada to introduce legislation to legalize recreational cannabis
I'm curious if all those decriminalizations and legalizations in various states & countries are having an impact on Netherlands' tourism.
OSButler··on TIS-100: the Programming Game You Never Asked For
I fully agree. Plus, most of those games are lacking in at least one of the two areas, so that you end up with either a bad game, or a bad programming lesson. Maybe the new VR market is going to introduce some new ideas in that area, but so far I'd prefer to either play an actual game or follow a proper programming lesson, instead of a mediocre combination of the two.
OSButler··on Man accidentally 'deletes his entire company' with one line of bad code
I once had an incident with a server which triggered notification alerts about a failing httpd service. While I was looking into the issue, the mail service suddenly stopped working, then the database service went down - it was like a slow cascading failure, affecting all services on the server one after the other. I finally noticed the 'rm' command in the process list and asked the client if he ran any custom commands as root on the machine. Turns out he followed the instructions on a website to install some custom software without checking any of the commands and just copied & pasted them into the prompt. He basically managed to "rm -rf" on / and deleted his own server.

Luckily recent backups were available, so the damage was rather small, but it was interesting to see someone just pasting & executing commands without knowing what they actually do, especially when logged in as root.

OSButler··on A C64 Games Mashup
I think that exact capability also attracted a lot of great musical talent to it, who used crazy techniques and experimented with it continuously to get new sounds out of that breadbox. It had a sense of evolution where you started with a beeping machine, then a game gets released with such a great soundtrack that you'd simply leave it running just to listen to it (Ninja, Traz, International Karate, Giana Sisters, ...), and then you get a demo that manages to play back the stoning scene of The Life of Brian - all that's still stuck in my head from my C64 days.
OSButler··on Ask HN: A spammer is spoofing my email address; what do I do?
It's extremely annoying, but usually the attacker will switch to another domain after a few hours or days. The mail notifications can be delayed by a few days, depending on the individual mail server's settings, so you should see a slowdown of the incoming bounce messages after a while before it will stop eventually.
OSButler··on Chinese Buy One-Third of Vancouver Homes: National Bank Estimate
This funny website lets you see what's available in the $1M range in Vancouver: http://www.crackshackormansion.com
OSButler··on That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people
In my case they mocked themselves, as I'm working on an old Macbook model. I'd love to upgrade, but everything is still working. The things I like about the new Macbooks barely affect my work and if I spec one out to my preferred options, then it ends up with an astronomical price tag. It just seems like they are advancing in some areas (screen, touchpad, ...) but are stuck in the past in several others (memory, HDD, ...).

I'll most likely be getting a new Macbook once my current one finally decides to visit its ancestors. With that said, I'm actually impressed with its longevity, as none of my other PCs (desktops & laptops) ever lasted that long. So, I actually see running on old hardware as an impressive feat (unless you're a gamer).

OSButler··on Making GitLab faster
I was running GitLab on a VPS with specs close to the lower end of the recommended requirements and its performance would gradually slow down over the course of the day until pages seemed to never finish loading. Restarting gitlab got it responding properly again, but the whole process would repeat over and over again, so that it had to be restarted every couple of hours just to be able to use it.

I then switched providers, which also came with more system resources, and GitLab was working without any issues right away. It could have been caused by an oversold node at the previous host, or the slightly higher system specs at the new host made the difference, but I've been running GitLab on that new server for a couple of months now without experiencing those slowdowns again.

If you've noticed a gradual slowdown to the point of pages getting stuck on loading indefinitely, then try to up the system specs a bit, as it could make quite the difference.

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